Humans love mobs. It makes them feel empowered, and gives them greater "authority" than they would otherwise have. We have seen mobs throughout human history cause all sorts of horrible incidents. But the difference between a physical mob and an internet mob, is that in a physical mob you can be identified, you are still risking some of your own safety, and you can usually immediately see the consequences of your own actions.
In an internet mob you can remain anonymous, you don't need to actually carry out any of the threats you make (others may do it for you, eg calling for somebody to be fired), and you aren't risk any of your own reputation.
I absolutely loath seeing mainstream media write about what happens on twitter/social media. It magnifies the mob far beyond reason. "Twttier in an outrage", "Internet blows up" it's just insane. Not only does it give the impression that vast majority of users on a platform are on the same side (they're not), it gives them pseudo-credibility. And unfortunately, the next step is for corporations to take them seriously.
The more I see these stories and see how social media has shaped and is shaping the 21st century, the more I wish it was never created. It was fun at first. But the dark side of humanity has been given a power it should never have had.
Companies already take them seriously to avoid the shit storm that comes after. See the VS code "santa gate" where microsoft removed the santa hat on christmas because one person opened a issue saying the santa hat was as offensive as a swastika to them.
Wow I was not aware of this. The original github issue:
> The Santa Hat on vscode insiders and pushing of religion is very offensive to me, additionally xmas has cost millions of Jews their lives over the centuries, yet even if that was not the case, pushing religious symbols as part of a product update is completely unacceptable. Please remove it immediately and make it your top priority. To me this is almost equally offensive as a swastika.
https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/87268
I didn't know that Santa Claus was a religious symbol, I celebrate with Santa and I do not affiliate with any religion. But the status quo is to accommodate every single person. People believe they are entitled to it: "Make it your top priority" -- OK boss! There needs to be a balance. Complete stubbornness is not good. Bending over to every single request, regardless of its merit, is not good either.
Oh yeah, for sure. I worked my comment badly. I meant that right after the media publishes a story, corporations immediately feel threatened/called to action, and actually do what the mob tells them to do. Sometimes it doesn't even take a media article. Seriously, if you "@" any company now, ask why they haven't spoken about about x yet, wait and see how long it takes them to say something.
I'm surprised there hasn't been much mention (at least for US-based folks) of at-will employment. People are getting fired for old social media posts, but people get fired for all sorts of other stupid reasons: the boss was in a bad mood, you missed work to go vote (again, US-specific because elections days aren't holidays here), the bus was late.
Meanwhile, the EU has much stricter regulations regarding employment and the conditions under which employees can be let go.
It's because at-will employment isn't the problem unless your boss is unreasonable, and if your boss is unreasonable then you should celebrate the opportunity to collect unemployment while you find a new job instead of having to quit or continue working there in the meantime.
But canceling everybody is problematically increasing the number of unreasonable bosses.
It certainly depends on employee's financial and social circumstances and the industry specifics, but it still begs a question if it's worth working for an arrogant asshole that could fire someone for a over a bad mood. Even if there's a law that says that they can't, one must be in quite dire circumstances to cling to a job where they are mistreated.
This said, I totally recognize I'm quite privileged in regard that the industry I'm working in, where business tend to generally value people and such senseless human resource management is typically misaligned with both employee and employers goals (putting it simple, being an asshole doesn't bring any profits). In such circumstances, my personal perception of at-will employment is positive - it makes sense to me that we (employee and employer) cooperate because we like each other, and there's nothing that binds us but our will for a mutually beneficial relationship.
Yet, unfortunately, I know this is not the case for many people but I have no idea what could to be done to fix this. But I suspect that legal protections that prevent firing people at-will are not helping the core issue here.
>Meanwhile, the EU has much stricter regulations regarding employment and the conditions under which employees can be let go.
Also much stricter regulations and norms around when you can leave. In the US, two weeks notice is customary but not legally required in the EU its often a three month contractual obligation. I can't help but think that may contribute to the generally lower salaries in the EU vs the US.
There are good arguments in favor of taking away section 230 immunity and probably better arguments against it, but the best possible argument for getting rid of the immunity is to get rid of social media forever regardless of the other consequences.
> The more I see these stories and see how social media has shaped and is shaping the 21st century, the more I wish it was never created.
I don't see how you can come to this conclusion when in the preceding paragraph you accurately portray the mainstream media as the actual manipulators. The media loves to televise drama, it's what sells. When there's no actual drama to be had, they manufacture it by highlight nonsense on social media or other means.
It's all so contrived now. "X say Y on Twitter! Here's a 5 minute diatribe about why that's outrageous with sarcastic analogies and something about true <insert country> values!"
I am a human and I don't love mobs. This article is all about incorrect assumptions. If I am not mistaken, the parent comment just made another one.
The part about the media amplifying what is on social media I absolutely agree with. I have always thought there is some strange irony in news outlets writing about something that is, at least in the case of newspapers, killing their own business.
I made a generalization which I still think is true, regardless of specific exceptions which will always exist for all generalizations.
Humans love to feel like they belong and they like to feel validated in their opinions. This doesn't always play out in the form of a mob. Even just "ganging up" on a friend in a group conversation is a result of these traits. Mob mentality shows itself in many ways. Perhaps I should've been clearer about mob mentality vs. the classic "mob". What we see happening on social media is I think a result of the majority of humans being susceptible to some form and some degree of mob mentality (groupthink, if you will).
If we think of humans as variable tribalism waveform propagators, then a mob is simply an incidence of intense constructive interference.
Perhaps you emit less tribalism energy than the average human, but it's still possible that in certain scenarios you, like any of us, would contribute to the constructive interference :)
Edit: Hmmm... I think we can actually extend this model by describing social media as a transform on these tribalism emissions that tends to heavily normalize, distort and exaggerate the signal into one of a relatively small set of outputs, thus greatly increasing the odds of constructive interference.
This happened locally just a few days ago. Protesters were blocking the street at an intersection where a vehicle came to make a legal right turn. Viral cell phone footage showed protestors surrounding the vehicle before the driver sped through the crowd, running over several (but not killing any) individuals. Everyone on social media condemned the driver, a gentleman in his 60's who was just going home after running errands, for plowing through protesters (ironically in a "white Excursion").
Turns out the driver was shot at the intersection -- twice -- and was injured and was trying to escape with his life.
When the police released the factual statement, it received almost no social media attention compared to the original (and false) accusations.
He had posted a Strava ride of the trail on the 28th, 29th, and 1st. The incident happened on the 30th. To internet detectives, this clearly meant he committed the crime on the 30th, and then deleted that ride from Strava.
It's scary to see how the mob was able to take exonerating evidence (him not riding on the 30th) and spin it to be a smoking gun: An innocent man would not have hidden the ride in question. Nobody even considered the possibility that he wasn't on the trail that day.
If people want to understand this phenomenon better, there is no better reference I could recommend than Rory Miller's Meditations on Violence[1] - specifically what he calls the "group monkey dance"[2].
The simplified explanation is this: the target of the attack by the group is no longer a person, but merely a target. Group members demonstrate their loyalty to the group by gradually escalating the violence they do to the target.
I would say that Jon Ronson's book "So You've Been Publicly Shamed" (mentioned in the article), is also excellent. I would especially recommend it for anyone building social media tech.
Technically, any justice administered by a mob is targetting innocents. At least, it used to be that things like fair trials were a requirement to establish guilt. Now is just seems like internet bullies can just bypass democratic processes and do anything they want to shout down, browbeat, hound, or destroy the people/companies they don't like. And they can get away with it as long as it has a thin veneer of the current moral issue...
Pretty much. I've started seeing a lot of people saying "innocent until proven guilty only applies to courts" as an excuse for mob justice. It's mostly the same people who say "freedom of speech only applies to government censorship".
I mean, those are both really important to remember - while society needs to find its balance and have respectful, intelligent conversation about tough issues, there is no obligation to give clearly bad people the benefit of the doubt within the community, nor is there an obligation to give objectively horrible people a social media platform with which to spread hate.
“The surest way to work up a crusade in favor of some good cause is to promise people they will have a chance of maltreating someone. To be able to destroy with good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behavior 'righteous indignation' — this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats.”
You'll get short shrift trying to defend unsympathetic targets, though. Many - if not most - people think those who appear to be guilty don't need a fair trial.
There's a gap between what the state can enforce, and what the people on their own can enforce. Within that gap, justice may or may not occur, but procedure is generally absent.
> Technically, any justice administered by a mob is targetting innocents. At least, it used to be that things like fair trials were a requirement to establish guilt.
No, people have never, as a general rule, been protected from social consequences of actual or perceived wrongdoing until proven guilty in a trial, only (and this mostly recently, historically, and adhering to far-from-universal principals of restraint) from certain (generally not all) government-imposed consequences.
Well the internet has certainly made far easier than it was before to inflict "social consequences" onto total strangers. Before, if you were a enough of a jerk, the townspeople would boycott your shop. Now, if you said the wrong thing in the past decade (or voted for the wrong candidate, or supported/didn't support the wrong/right bill/proposition/amendment), a mob composed of thousands of people from various locations thousands of miles away will call for your company to be boycotted, for you to be fired, etc. or else.
Standard retort: if a boss suspects a minimum wage worker of underperforming for the capitalist machine, he can just fire her, no questions asked. Having our burgers flipped correctly is important enough to us that we accept collateral damage there. Now when her boss is accused of being a sexist pig, we suddenly have to be 100% sure. Why? Are women less important to us than burgers? Or is "due process" just a concern troll that powerful people throw around to protect each other? Either way, bad look.
I don't think this is right, but countering it takes some thought.
Attacking at-will employment whenever danger of Internet hate mobs is pointed out is a bit of a whataboutism. Not everyone worried about Internet hate mobs is otherwise a supporter of at-will employment.
But that's really a distraction from the core issue. The thing about at-will employment is the it presumes that the employment relationship is largely between the employer and the employee. That assumption breaks down in the face of an Internet mob. This is part of the reason why the proof standard for how you treat complete strangers is different than the proof standard for how you treat people you know, including employees.
Furthermore, in the theory that underpins American capitalism, employment is an economic relationship. For example, if a burger flipper is sufficiently bad at flipping burgers, he shouldn't be a burger flipper, because her status as a burger flipper is predicated on her ability to do that job. Even in the most socialist systems that I'm aware of, basic competence is considered a prerequisite for holding a job. Moral qualities are usually considered less important unless they impact the job. In the American system, people are theoretically hired and fired primarily based on their ability to do their job, but Internet mobs change this equation thoroughly. Now, your political opinions affect your employability as well.
I think that this has profound implications for democracy.
This is a really great point. It takes an order of magnitude more energy to come up with a thoughtful rebuttal to this, and when you're done, you'll likely end up with a wall of text that gets TLDR'd. This is why reason loses on Twitter, it takes a Paul Graham level essay to counter even the most basic immflamatory logic.
Or there's a whole host of reasons why you may not want to associate with, or associate with the employer of someone who doesn't break any crimes but who's behavior is still abhorrent.
If it is abhorrent, we must make a law to make it illegal. Otherwise, anyone that think that you make something that is abhorrent can pressure your employer to fire you.
These industries are spurned by growth-hacking companies that receive a lot of VC funding to do just that: prove out "user value" which is code for "get as many users as possible".
Twitter, Reddit, FB, Instagram all thrive on mediocrity amplified by the loudest voices. And then these investors and founders brag about user engagement, customer acquisition, retention and such meaningless numbers. None of it maps to user value. Because this drives advertisements to their sites.
Unless there companies actively reduce this nonsense, things will never change.
In addition to that, they delegated moderation to users, and some platforms even actively sought certain ideas while suppressing others, thus compounding on the mob effect. Twitter is notoriously guilty of this (although not the only one): wrongthink is actively patrolled, and reputations/jobs, (sometimes even worse), are routinely destroyed.
Or -- we institute much stronger limits on advertising. We blame tech companies for being complicit, but they are following advertising dollars. Without advertising dollars, the whole thing dries up.
I think the dismissal here of the Jon Ronson piece is unwarranted, and if anyone here hasn't heard about it I'd definitely read that in preference to this post. I find it much more interesting when there are grey areas and nuance in the story rather than completely innocent people being blindsided. (And after hearing her story in full I'd argue that there the woman who told the stupid joke is effectively innocent too, if rather naive). There's a series of BBC podcasts with abridged versions of the stories in his book here: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p07hj31g
It reminds one of the story of the Dazexiang uprising.
There were army units ordered to report to another location. On the way there they were delayed by flooding. The penalty for being late was death. This was no different than the penalty for insurrection, so guess what they did then.
Readit News
In an internet mob you can remain anonymous, you don't need to actually carry out any of the threats you make (others may do it for you, eg calling for somebody to be fired), and you aren't risk any of your own reputation.
I absolutely loath seeing mainstream media write about what happens on twitter/social media. It magnifies the mob far beyond reason. "Twttier in an outrage", "Internet blows up" it's just insane. Not only does it give the impression that vast majority of users on a platform are on the same side (they're not), it gives them pseudo-credibility. And unfortunately, the next step is for corporations to take them seriously.
The more I see these stories and see how social media has shaped and is shaping the 21st century, the more I wish it was never created. It was fun at first. But the dark side of humanity has been given a power it should never have had.
> The Santa Hat on vscode insiders and pushing of religion is very offensive to me, additionally xmas has cost millions of Jews their lives over the centuries, yet even if that was not the case, pushing religious symbols as part of a product update is completely unacceptable. Please remove it immediately and make it your top priority. To me this is almost equally offensive as a swastika. https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/87268
I didn't know that Santa Claus was a religious symbol, I celebrate with Santa and I do not affiliate with any religion. But the status quo is to accommodate every single person. People believe they are entitled to it: "Make it your top priority" -- OK boss! There needs to be a balance. Complete stubbornness is not good. Bending over to every single request, regardless of its merit, is not good either.
The entire industry of TV and film has been turned to shit as an endless appeal to that mob that can never be sated on social media.
Advertising plays this shit too
I've thought for a while that non-religiousneess is becoming a religion in its own right.
Certain people on the Internet keep trying to convince me I am right :-)
Meanwhile, the EU has much stricter regulations regarding employment and the conditions under which employees can be let go.
But canceling everybody is problematically increasing the number of unreasonable bosses.
This said, I totally recognize I'm quite privileged in regard that the industry I'm working in, where business tend to generally value people and such senseless human resource management is typically misaligned with both employee and employers goals (putting it simple, being an asshole doesn't bring any profits). In such circumstances, my personal perception of at-will employment is positive - it makes sense to me that we (employee and employer) cooperate because we like each other, and there's nothing that binds us but our will for a mutually beneficial relationship.
Yet, unfortunately, I know this is not the case for many people but I have no idea what could to be done to fix this. But I suspect that legal protections that prevent firing people at-will are not helping the core issue here.
Also much stricter regulations and norms around when you can leave. In the US, two weeks notice is customary but not legally required in the EU its often a three month contractual obligation. I can't help but think that may contribute to the generally lower salaries in the EU vs the US.
Deleted Comment
I don't see how you can come to this conclusion when in the preceding paragraph you accurately portray the mainstream media as the actual manipulators. The media loves to televise drama, it's what sells. When there's no actual drama to be had, they manufacture it by highlight nonsense on social media or other means.
It's all so contrived now. "X say Y on Twitter! Here's a 5 minute diatribe about why that's outrageous with sarcastic analogies and something about true <insert country> values!"
I am a human and I don't love mobs. This article is all about incorrect assumptions. If I am not mistaken, the parent comment just made another one.
The part about the media amplifying what is on social media I absolutely agree with. I have always thought there is some strange irony in news outlets writing about something that is, at least in the case of newspapers, killing their own business.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/columbus-statue-in-baltimore-to...
Humans love to feel like they belong and they like to feel validated in their opinions. This doesn't always play out in the form of a mob. Even just "ganging up" on a friend in a group conversation is a result of these traits. Mob mentality shows itself in many ways. Perhaps I should've been clearer about mob mentality vs. the classic "mob". What we see happening on social media is I think a result of the majority of humans being susceptible to some form and some degree of mob mentality (groupthink, if you will).
If we think of humans as variable tribalism waveform propagators, then a mob is simply an incidence of intense constructive interference.
Perhaps you emit less tribalism energy than the average human, but it's still possible that in certain scenarios you, like any of us, would contribute to the constructive interference :)
Edit: Hmmm... I think we can actually extend this model by describing social media as a transform on these tribalism emissions that tends to heavily normalize, distort and exaggerate the signal into one of a relatively small set of outputs, thus greatly increasing the odds of constructive interference.
Turns out the driver was shot at the intersection -- twice -- and was injured and was trying to escape with his life.
When the police released the factual statement, it received almost no social media attention compared to the original (and false) accusations.
Dead Comment
He had posted a Strava ride of the trail on the 28th, 29th, and 1st. The incident happened on the 30th. To internet detectives, this clearly meant he committed the crime on the 30th, and then deleted that ride from Strava.
It's scary to see how the mob was able to take exonerating evidence (him not riding on the 30th) and spin it to be a smoking gun: An innocent man would not have hidden the ride in question. Nobody even considered the possibility that he wasn't on the trail that day.
The simplified explanation is this: the target of the attack by the group is no longer a person, but merely a target. Group members demonstrate their loyalty to the group by gradually escalating the violence they do to the target.
___
1. http://amazon.com/dp/1594391181
2. https://ymaa.com/articles/violence-dynamics
> It's mostly the same people who say "freedom of speech only applies to government censorship".
This is a different issue and is a lot trickier logically. But it essentially is true.
― Aldous Huxley, Crome Yellow
There's a gap between what the state can enforce, and what the people on their own can enforce. Within that gap, justice may or may not occur, but procedure is generally absent.
No, people have never, as a general rule, been protected from social consequences of actual or perceived wrongdoing until proven guilty in a trial, only (and this mostly recently, historically, and adhering to far-from-universal principals of restraint) from certain (generally not all) government-imposed consequences.
I don't think this is right, but countering it takes some thought.
But that's really a distraction from the core issue. The thing about at-will employment is the it presumes that the employment relationship is largely between the employer and the employee. That assumption breaks down in the face of an Internet mob. This is part of the reason why the proof standard for how you treat complete strangers is different than the proof standard for how you treat people you know, including employees.
Furthermore, in the theory that underpins American capitalism, employment is an economic relationship. For example, if a burger flipper is sufficiently bad at flipping burgers, he shouldn't be a burger flipper, because her status as a burger flipper is predicated on her ability to do that job. Even in the most socialist systems that I'm aware of, basic competence is considered a prerequisite for holding a job. Moral qualities are usually considered less important unless they impact the job. In the American system, people are theoretically hired and fired primarily based on their ability to do their job, but Internet mobs change this equation thoroughly. Now, your political opinions affect your employability as well.
I think that this has profound implications for democracy.
Deleted Comment
Twitter, Reddit, FB, Instagram all thrive on mediocrity amplified by the loudest voices. And then these investors and founders brag about user engagement, customer acquisition, retention and such meaningless numbers. None of it maps to user value. Because this drives advertisements to their sites.
Unless there companies actively reduce this nonsense, things will never change.
There were army units ordered to report to another location. On the way there they were delayed by flooding. The penalty for being late was death. This was no different than the penalty for insurrection, so guess what they did then.
Proportionality is important.